Robert G. Kaufman: Mideast peace delusions

Israelis hold pictures of loved ones killed by Palestinian terrorists and posters with bloody hands with Hebrew writing that reads, "prison release form," during a demonstration in Jerusalem against a release of Palestinian prisoners, July 28. ASSOCIATED PRESS

Immersed in scandal and gridlock at home, second-term presidents typically shift their attention to foreign affairs. A mounting preoccupation with their legacy also impels such beleaguered presidents to pursue breakthroughs in international affairs.

Think of President Richard Nixon's feckless pursuit of Détente with the Soviet Union during the Watergate scandal. Think likewise of President Bill Clinton's doomed attempt to solve the Israel-Arab dispute during the controversy surrounding his dalliances with Monica Lewinsky.

Add the scandal-ridden Obama administration to this pantheon of folly. The president and his secretary of state have picked the worst possible moment to press for a comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and its Palestinian enemies.

Start with the broader regional contexts of these negotiations, with the United States retrenching and retreating, globally and in the Middle East. By making withdrawal rather than victory the paramount objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by reducing American defense spending precipitously, the Obama administration has established a dangerous gravitational pull towards fanaticism and tyranny rather than freedom and prosperity.

The administration's Mideast policy is in shambles. The president has turned a blind eye to Islamic radicalism, abandoning the Iranian opposition in favor of negotiating unconditionally with Iranian mullahs intent on developing nuclear weapons and annihilating Israel. It has propitiated a virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, denying the very existence of a threat emanating from radical Islamists.

The administration has consistently misread the dynamics and trajectory of the Arab Spring. In Syria, “Leading from Behind” has left the murderous anti-American Bashar al-Assad in power, amid slaughter and the mounting radicalism of the opposition. The catastrophic civil war has strengthened an increasingly hostile Russia, Syria's patron, Hezbollah in Lebanon and its fanatical Iranian sponsors.

In these circumstances, the most radical anti-American elements of the region will interpret the administration's determination to revive the Israel-Arab peace process as appeasement and weakness, which they will relentlessly exploit. America's enemies will rejoice, too, that Israel unwisely heeded the administration's advice to release hundreds of terrorists as a goodwill gesture, which the Palestinian Authority has no intention of reciprocating.

The administration does not grasp either the regional context of their peace initiative or the facts or equities of the conflict between Israel and its enemies. From the beginning, the president has wrongly blamed a decent democratic Israel more than the tyrannies bent on eradicating the Jewish State. Neither the Palestinian authority, nor Hamas, nor the increasingly radical regimes of the region, recognize Israel's right to exist as a state within defensible boundaries.

The chief Palestinian entities envisage these negotiations as a means of achieving Israel's elimination through a two-stage solution, using the process as a continuation of war by other means. Hence, the Palestinian Authority has not abandoned its insistence on the so-called right of return for all Palestinian refugees, based on an unprecedentedly broad interpretation of who qualifies as a refugee. Israel, which inherited thousands of Jewish refugees from the Middle East without complaint, would commit demographic suicide as a Jewish state, were it to accept such a standard.

Unlike President George W. Bush, who denounced the Trojan horse of the “Right of Return” aimed at Israel's destruction, President Obama has remained silent, implying he agrees with it.

No plausible basis for legitimate agreement exists on other key issues such as Israel's borders or the status of Jerusalem. Even worse, the president has frequently called for a Palestinian state with contiguous borders, which would render a rump Jewish state remaining divided and almost impossible to defend.

When negotiations inevitably reveal the intractability of these issues, the Obama administration will make matters worse by pressuring Israel to make concessions. This will intensify the deplorable international campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state in the European Union and the United Nations.

The United States will achieve neither peace nor honor by this ill-fated effort of the Obama administration to transcend its domestic difficulties. Sooner or later, President Obama will reap for the United States what he sows by making it more dangerous to be America's democratic friend rather than tyrannical enemy.

Robert G. Kaufman is a professor of public policy at Pepperdine University.

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